Today’s Mother Jones reports on "Liz Cheney’s Coalition of the Unwilling." The article is based on a report by the Government Accountability Project (GAP), which reviewed 267 State Department documents obtained through nearly three years of FOIA requests.
GAP’s report tells a story about Bush administration neocons, the Iraq War, cronyism, astroturfing and an affair. Its characters include Iraq War architect Paul Wolfowitz, his romantic partner Shaha Riza, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz Cheney. The chronicle sets out the clumsy and ill-advised attempts of the Bush administration to spread democracy in the Middle East, while undermining transparency at home. In short, it is a microcosm of the Bush presidency. Intrigued? Read below the fold for more.
Those familiar with the Paul Wolfowitz scandal at the World Bank may remember the Foundation for the Future (FFF). Three years ago, Wolfowitz was forced to resign from the World Bank presidency after GAP published the payroll records of his girlfriend, Shaha Riza. The records showed that Riza, a British national who worked as a World Bank communications officer, was seconded to the U.S. Department of State after Wolfowitz was appointed, where she was responsible for establishing the Foundation for the Future (FFF), an obscure nonprofit organization funded by the State Department that was tasked with promoting democracy and reform in the Broader Middle East and North Africa region. While seconded to the State Department, Riza received salary raises in excess of what Bank rules allowed, earning far more than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice (who, incidentally, was a strong supporter of the FFF herself, as demonstrated by the numerous letters that she sent to Senators on the Foundation’s behalf).
The documents obtained by GAP show that Liz Cheney - as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs at the State Department - may have been the brains behind this whole secondment arrangement, in which Riza was assigned to an unsupervised and unevaluated position by the World Bank to promote an overtly political US agenda in the Middle East in violation of conflict of interest regulations at the Bank as well as the national security, tax and visa regulations of the US government.
The report also shows that the Foundation for the Future was a pet project of Cheney’s and a haven for people with political connections. In addition, Cheney was instrumental in the Foundation’s launch and failure to obtain broad international support. As I said in GAP’s press release:
"Liz Cheney had the preposterous idea that the Foundation for the Future would bring peace and democracy to the Middle East," said GAP International Program Officer Shelley Walden, author of the report.
"The project was doomed from the start – State Department officials in the region warned that restrictive laws in the Persian Gulf states would make the Foundation ineffective; BMENA governments did not support a Foundation that would give their opposition a platform from which to oppose them; and potential donors had misgivings about the project’s lack of indigenous imprint. Despite these warning signs, Cheney and the Bush administration moved full steam ahead and established the Foundation anyway."
In 2005, Liz Cheney, Shaha Riza and Condoleezza Rice embarked on an international crusade to obtain financial and diplomatic support for FFF. Their goal was $60 million, $35 million of which would come from the U.S. government. In late November, a State Department cable approved by Cheney stated that a total of $56 million had been committed to the Foundation by:
United States ($35 million), European Commission ($1.3 million), Spain ($1 million), United Kingdom ($1 million), Switzerland ($1 million), Denmark ($2 million), Netherlands ($1 million), Greece ($1.5 million), Turkey ($500,000), Italy (TBD), Hungary (in kind), Jordan ($1 million), Qatar ($10 million), and Bahrain ($1 million).
But some of these amounts appear to have been pure fabrication. By 2009, the Foundation had received less than $28 million in government contributions, more than $21 million of which came from the U.S. government.
Why would the State Department lie about this, you ask? There are several reasons. The first may have been to cover-up incompetency. As my co-worker, Bea Edwards, said:
"The Foundation for the Future was to promote democracy, transparency and popular political participation on a multilateral basis in the Middle East," said GAP International Program Director Bea Edwards. "So when Liz Cheney – who, in the view of many Middle Eastern leaders, occupied her position largely because she was the Vice President’s daughter – asked other nations for contributions, they balked. Add to this the fact that the Foundation’s board member selection process was directed by the former Deputy Secretary of Defense’s girlfriend and that the Foundation was managed by a personal friend of Wolfowitz’s with little expertise in the region, and it’s no wonder that many potential donors refused to fund it."
Also, the State Department had a problem: U.S. law required that all U.S. contributions to the FFF be matched by contributions from other governments. It appears that in order to obtain a disbursement of $21.3 million to the FFF (your tax dollars at work), State Department officials had to deliberately mislead the US Congress about the funding pledged to the Foundation by other governments. Evidence strongly suggests that section 534(k) of US Public Law 109-102, which at that time stipulated that funds could only be made available to the Foundation to the extent that they had been matched by contributions from other governments, was violated; the Foundation’s own reports show that less than $6.4 million of the $22.26 million in "matching funds" listed by the State Department in its communications with Congress as pledged ever materialized.
Especially suspicious was the State Department’s representation of a murky $10 million pledge from Qatar, the largest "pledge" of any country other than the United States. Documents indicate that the State Department knew that this pledge would never materialize when it asked Congress to disburse matching funds, as detailed in David Corn’s Mother Jones piece.
In Corn’s words, GAP’s report also documents "that the foundation was a US government production, not truly a multilateral effort." As we wrote in the report, "the organization that was charged with making the Foundation for the Future operational reported directly to the US State Department, not to a multilateral group made up of either European and Middle Eastern governments or civil society organizations."
Cheney and the Foundation for the Future declined to comment on questions posed by Corn. In the words of comedian George Carlin, " ‘No comment' is a comment."
Your comments and questions on this blog (my first on DailyKos!) are, of course, welcome.